Slashdot Mirror
'You Can See Almost Everything.' Antarctica Just Became the Best-Mapped Continent on Earth (fortune.com)
Antarctica has become the best-mapped continent on Earth with a new high-resolution terrain map showing the ice-covered landmass in unprecedented detail. From a report: According to the scientists at Ohio State University and the University of Minnesota who created the imagery, Antarctica is now the best-mapped continent on Earth. The Reference Elevation Model of Antarctica (REMA) was constructed using hundreds of thousands of satellite images taken between 2009 and 2017, Earther reports. A supercomputer assembled the massive amounts of data, including the elevation of the land over time, and created REMA, an immensely detailed topographical map, with a file size over 150 terabytes. The new map has a resolution of 2 to 8 meters, compared to the usual 1,000 meters, says an Ohio State press release. According to The New York Times, the detail of this new map is the equivalent of being able to see down to a car, or smaller, when before you could only see the whole of Central Park. Scientists now know the elevation of every point of Antarctica, with an error margin of just a few feet.
The reason there is such good coverage is that many of the low orbit imaging satellites orbit North/South, following the day/night terminator. It's called a sun-synchronous orbit, and while it covers the entire planet eventually, the north and south poles are covered on every pass. So you can get a lot more detail there for free, essentially.
while (sig==sig) sig=!sig;
It would have to be a dog-less sled since sled dogs are banned by international treaty from Antarctica.